How to Develop Endless Motivation (4 Techniques)
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What's up, crafters - Khalil here again. And in this video I'm gonna give you four strategies that I personally use to keep myself motivated to tap into purpose and intention and to make things happen, captain.
So I'm gonna give you each of these here because I've personally found that they work wonders for me. And I hope that by sharing them with you today, here in this video, they can help you sustain your motivation to remain on the journey to mastery and achieve whatever it is that you want to use your skills for.
By no means do you need to do each and every single one of these, but I hope that by giving them to you here, this can help unblock you if you run into some motivation problems.
So why is this important? At the start of any endeavor, it's pretty normal to feel really excited. There's that initial high of something new, the potential for fun, the idea of what we could achieve or what we might be able to do. But the moment we come across challenge or we realize that [00:01:00] we might have to put in a lot of effort or even just sometimes a minimal amount of effort,
it's normal to note a drop in motivation and energy because at the end of the day, it is only natural for us to prefer the path of least resistance, the path of most ease, to just move on to go to the next thing and quit what we were doing.
The problem is that by seeking comfort out like that, we can run into a trap. If we're always listening to this feeling, we're never going to achieve anything we want. And as you maneuver through the program, as I've mentioned before, you're gonna be asked to do some design things, you're gonna be asked to do some testing things, and you're gonna be asked to do a fair amount of putting in the reps to achieve a level of comfort with your skills.
Even further than that, let's say you're at work and you're feeling bored about doing things like creating forms and dashboards. What I've found is that sometimes all you really need is a quick little mindset shift,
if nothing, but changing the container around the problem in the way that we see ourselves in relation to where we're [00:02:00] going and to our goal. Sometimes what was once very boring can all of a sudden turn into a fountain of curiosity and energy. To me, this is a little bit of a superpower. It's some magic mind stuff.
That's what we're gonna get into in this final video in the mindset training portion of the course.
So the very first strategy I recommend is to get very clear on what you actually care about, what actually matters to you. That makes sense, right? This is to start the process of discovery.
You had to know I was gonna ask this at some point.
Let me ask you.
What is your reason for taking this course?
Now, if you've gone ahead and done the action items, I've asked of you, you've probably already posted into the meet channel and you've shared why it as you joined this course in the first place.
Some of you want to learn domain-driven design, to do test-driven development better to learn how to deal with sagas, front end architecture and so on. This is great and all to learn these topics, but this is kind of surface [00:03:00] level.
Focusing on these topics these things right here.
For some people this may be enough, but for a lot of people, this may not be enough to keep you motivated. Especially when things get tough and you feel like things might feel a little repetitive or they might get hard, or you have to put in the reps to improve your skills. What we want to do here is find the intention behind why you want to learn these technical things in the first place and connect to something more authentically, purposeful to you, a greater "why" than just "I wanna learn domain-driven design".
A great technique you can use here is to follow the trail of whys. It's to ask yourself why over and over until you find something with an emotional charge. So why is it that I want to learn domain-driven design? Because I'm making a mess in my code base? And why does that matter to you? Because I want to do a good job.
And why does it matter to you to do a good job? Follow this as far as you need to until you find something that actually matters to you. [00:04:00] And this is something you want to keep in the foreground of your mind instead. Because we need to find something that is emotional in order to keep ourselves motivated because it is more of these emotional reasons rather than the logical ones that will keep us on track in moving towards our goals.
So what you could do here is go ahead and take out a piece of paper and for five minutes write down your trail of "why"s for why you're taking the course in the first place and write down The Real Reason.
Connected to this strategy are a lot of other strategies. Stephen Kotler recommends in his book The Art of the Impossible that passion actually starts out as a curiosity and that it's an intersection between two things you find really interesting or as Robert Greene recommends, is to return to what brought you joy when you were a young'n and to continue to find a way to create alignment to that in your adult life and integrate some of it into what you're doing today.
Or you could be extreme like me and do what I do, which is called a Death Meditation which is where I lie down for 15 minutes and I pretend [00:05:00] that's it.
I'm no longer a re recurring character in this story called life. That was it for me, and I asked myself, what is it that I wish did. I take note of what comes up. Now, this means getting really into it, of course. And as I said, it's a little bit extreme, but
" if you want extreme results, you have to do extreme stuff"
The second strategy here is to
cultivate the correct social ties. Now you've probably heard the saying, you are the five people you spend the most time with. Or show me your friends and I will show you your future. What I need you to recognize here that it is actually a lot more intense than that.
For example, there was a 32 year old study that evaluated how likely you are to become obese based on the people that you spend your time around. They evaluated a densely interconnected social network of around 12,067 people or something like that,
dozens of cities repeatedly from 1971 to 2003.
And basically the studies showed that if a friend of yours becomes obese, you [00:06:00] yourself are
45% more likely to gain weight over the next few years. Now, even more surprisingly, however, they found that if a friend of a friend of yours becomes obese, your likelihood of weight gain increases by around 20%.
So what does that mean? Obesity in this study appeared to spread directly through social ties. It spread not by where you live. It was spread by the social network. And that meant that the entire network got heavier over time.
If a friend of yours is obese, that changes your perception of what an acceptable body size is, and it would change your behavior accordingly. Researchers tried to figure out why this was. And they looked at a ton of different explanations, but ultimately what they found is it does come down to the social norms. The social norms change what you perceive as acceptable.
Now they didn't just leave it here with this one area.
That's just one example.
They went on to test this in other areas like smoking, happiness, money.
And what they found is that they got the same [00:07:00] results every time.
James Clear, the entrepreneur and behavioral science expert describes environment
as the invisible hand that shapes human behavior, and the biggest part of your environment are the people you spend time interacting with. As a result of this, the highest performing people throughout history have learned to implement social groups or masterminds into their communities and into their lives.
This has become the best way for humans to reach their peak state and live to their fullest potential.
Ada Lovelace, who you could say is the mother of computer programming. She spent much of her time in scientific communities and it was here that she met Dr. Charles Babbage.
And arguably just because of that one connection, we now have these computers for me to share this video with you here on.
Or you can take the PayPal Mafia, the team that pioneered online payments, each of them individually went on to create huge successes on their own creating YouTube, [00:08:00] Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, SpaceX, YouTube, Yammer, Yelp... it goes on
communities and peer groups have given us some of the world's greatest leaders and creators. And these folks went on to create and add an incalculable value to the world. Because think about what this obesity study proved.
It showed us that people you don't even know are affecting your outcomes in life, which can be scary and bad, but it also goes the other way too.
So when you're in a mastermind or you're in a focused community like this one, you're surrounded by developers who are also on the path to mastery and are also being affected by people you do not even know, and that in turn affects everybody's behavior exponentially.
Tony Robbins that even once said that "the quality of your life is a direct reflection of the expectations of your peer group".
The evidence that this proves is abundantly clear. It's not really a matter of this research being facts or not. Ultimately this is a matter of spending time in the proper environments so that you could rise to the level we expect of [00:09:00] ourselves.
So what can you do here?
Make exceptional use of the Discord community that we have here. Join the discussions, meet others, share your wins, your losses, ask questions, contribute to the success of others, and you will be contributing to the success of yourself as well.
Many of you here could end up building products together, working together, or even just helping to build out this community and make it even better.
At the end of the day, we all want the same things here. So #justShowUp.
Moving along to the
third strategy, and this is what I call the positive, negative, short-term, long-term framework. The existentialists believed that you are condemned and blessed to be free. At any time in your life, you are always choosing. So by you choosing to procrastinate or you choosing to not follow through,
You might think that's not you choosing what you're doing, but in reality, you actually are choosing, you're choosing your nature. And this is something that makes us incredible as human beings, which is to rise [00:10:00] above our inherent nature. But the thing about our inherent nature is that we tend to be more short-term focused.
We tend to want to strive more towards comfort and ease most of the time, even when it's not good for us in the long term. This is what the positive, negative, short-term, long-term framework I use is meant to help us with.
I use this as a tool to create both a vision and an anti vision of what my future could look like. So here's how it works.
Let's go with the short term first, positive, negative. Let's say my goal was to improve my health by sticking to an exercise schedule. In the short term, the positive is that, let's say I could have more energy after I work out, but the negative is that
in reality, I actually don't want to do it. I hate doing this to be honest, but if I make my decisions solely based on this level, I'm never going to be working out. And the reason for this is that the negative emotional charge, which is that I don't really want to be working out today, is much greater than the potential of the positive one.
But if we were to look at the [00:11:00] positive negative in the long term, the emotional charge here the differential between them actually shifts quite a fair amount.
In the long term the positive is that I'll be healthier. And they say that your health is your wealth. I'll be able to spend time with my family, move around, see awesome things, and just enjoy more of life.
And in the long term, if I don't start making these wise decisions about my health, what could happen? I might not have the level of mobility that I want, and I might not be able to take in as much life as I want either.
This is an extremely simple framework, but it is really effective because it plays on something inherent to the way our mind works, which is that the body cannot really tell the difference between what is imagined and what is real.
So if you meditate on a vision, whether it be a positive one or a negative one, This is going to allow you to tap into the emotional charge associated with that.
This really is some magic that allows you to make better decisions in the long term for yourself.
Now, even if you don't do this, you really do want to figure out how to [00:12:00] stick to the commitments you're making because as Aristotle once said, quality is not an act, but a habit.
This goes into the final strategy
which is to commit to the process.
Now you could do this by writing a contract yourself, printing it out, putting it somewhere you could see every day. And this really truly is an easy one, but an incredibly effective one as well. It's one that I've personally used myself, I've had some letters that I've written to myself from over four or five years ago when I first started my journey, and I've been seeing them over and over every single day and as I've seen myself move towards where I was trying to go with a clear intent I've actually pulled down and taken a lot of these off my wall and put them into my memory box.
It is not about being perfect here, and I am by no means perfect.
I have a lot of problems and faults, but one thing I could tell you is that I do come back to what matters and continually try my best.
And that's all I expect of you, which is just to keep coming back and keep continuing on this process to what really authentically matters to you.
Just don't [00:13:00] give up.
So that's gonna do it for this video and to recap everything that we've just talked about in this whole section:
Purpose is gonna be the antidote to boredom, but it's gonna take a little bit of work to find and maintain.
It's going to require a little bit of introspection, some mindset hacks and some consistency. But if you can find some purpose and you can keep it in the foreground. It is quite possibly the most powerful motivator that will actually allow you to accomplish your goals, because it's gonna consistently be pulling you back towards what really matters to you.
We covered a few strategies you can use, such as finding what authentically matters to you, projecting yourself into that state, following the trail of why's cultivating social ties that will actually help you utilize some of the positive, negative short term, long term framework and committing to the process by writing yourself a letter and putting it somewhere where you could see every day.
Now, again, by no means do you need to do all of this stuff, but consider these tools if you find yourself struggling with motivation and you want to [00:14:00] continue moving forward on the path towards mastery.
And that's gonna do it for this video.
So go ahead and try out some of these techniques, I trust they'll help you if you stick to 'em.
And as always, I'll see you in there.
To mastery.
[updated]
The "why" question is quite powerful, as it can reveal some of our deepest values and motivations.
For example, in my case, I wanted to change my career because I found myself hating what I was doing. But when I kept asking "why," I realized that what I truly desired was more freedom and more time to spend with my children.
These desires represent my "Core Values" – the fundamental principles that guide my decisions and actions. While motivation can fluctuate, these values remain constant.
By understanding and aligning with our core values, we can make decisions that are more meaningful and fulfilling in the long run.
These are great strategies in order to convince myself that I can be a great problem solver. Right now, deep inside I have very low self-esteem about my problem-solving skills. That affects my career and the wish to be a lead developer/architect